NICE Robotic Automation Reviews

I used the software in conjunction with ServiceNow, a ticketing system. For example, the tickets contain user information and requests and then, NICE Robotic Automation software navigates relevant applications and extracts the necessary information. The majority of the information consists of statements from the user, which are then sent to the printer for a printout.

There are multiple processes involved in updating the tickets, such as extracting information onto an Excel sheet. These are the types of use cases for me.

NICE is advertised as having low-code development, but it is not very user-friendly. An IT professional with no coding experience cannot create a bot using NICE; instead, they have to depend on C# or .NET to develop RPA and then push it to NICE RPA. 

The development process is complex. I used to take screenshots and extract valuable information from them when I worked with NICE Robotics Automation over three years ago. Since then, I am not sure whether they have made any changes to the platform. However, it appears that not many people are using it anymore.

It is quicker compared to other bots, especially in the line of executions of automation.

There is a need for NICE to be more user-friendly. It should be designed in such a way that any developer can easily develop bots. For instance, Power Automate provides a good example of a user-friendly design that NICE can learn from. 

Moreover, in terms of documentation, there is very little available for NICE, making it challenging to implement the bots. So, documentation should be improved as well.

There are a lot of additional features that could be included in NICE. As the NICE Robotic Automation claims, it is a low-code solution, but that is not entirely true. They need to concentrate on the prerequisites and building blocks. There should be more options available internally that are easy to use and well-developed.

I have been using it for four to five months. Moreover, I have been using version 4.1.3, which includes real-time design capabilities.

When we originally migrated to NICE, we were not able to succeed in implementing the bots. We faced stability issues which affected our overall automation efforts. From my experience, I would not recommend NICE for RPA implementation.

I would rate the scalability a four out of ten.

The customer support is spontaneous.

Neutral

The deployment of NICE Robotic Automation is easy and can be done by a single developer. However, adapting the code is complex.

The number of people required for deployment depends on the client and whether they follow any standards.

We did see ROI because the whole point of implementing RPA is to achieve a return on investment. In the first year, the investment in NICE Robotics is intended for ROI. So if we implement the code properly, it will result in ROI. However, we would require support from NICE Robotics Automation team to properly implement the code.

I would say look for a better tool. If you don't have any other option, then go with NICE. If you have another option, you could invest in Power Automate or UiPath because it has more proper functionality and more proper support.

Overall, I would rate it a six out of ten.

By nature, I use automation everywhere, from business processes to governance and user support.

The most interesting project included 60 robotic processes worked by only four unattended agents, intelligently orchestrated by a specific process, which was also responsible for monitoring and managing the infrastructure, switching resources on or off as needed.

This approach has not only saved a lot of working time but also economically in managing the infrastructure.

Combining automation technology with human work is certainly an invaluable advantage, yet on the condition that high-performing tools such as NICE are used in the best possible way, exploiting, as in this case, the ability to interact (NEVA), which many others lack. This type of interaction allows real-time control of what happens. On the development side, it allows us to exploit human adaptability in case the bot finds an unexpected situation. In doing so, the robotic flow benefits by learning how to behave at the subsequent appearance of the same anomaly.
Over time, this type of use of interaction allows the user to have more time available and, at the same time, transfer greater independence to the robotic flow without ever excluding the user from punctual and exhaustive monitoring.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include: 

- A high graphical interaction in desktop automation. Through interfaces called Callout (created with HTML code) it is possible to create a strong interactivity with the user. These interfaces can be extremely dynamic in relation to the behavior of a local or remote robotic flow.

- The advantage of loading several flows of robotics simultaneously on a single agent. This allows for the ability to manage and organize the flows themselves so they are in agreement with the other robotic agents.

- The possibility of directly and securely exchanging data between robotic agents, thus being able to create distributed and parallel processes, and organizing work teams in compliance with SLAs.

- The ability to develop both locally and on the web.

- The ability to have the server part on Linux.

There is nothing so relevant to complain about except a few more options in the debug monitor (which is already very powerful and useful right now).

There are a few areas for improvement in the installation phase, however. Unlike others, the procedure in some points requires uncommon IT skills, and it is also true that in order to install the platform, it is mandatory to obtain certification as an installer. We are not talking about a simple application but a platform with a certain level of complexity inside.                                     

I have been using NICE since 2012, and I was the first full certified person in Italy.

The solution is very stable provided that the environment that hosts it is itself stable.

Any robotic tool would struggle in an underperforming and unstable environment.

The scalability is very positive. It has very flexible architecture.

Customer service and support are of the highest level, provided that certain conditions are respected (agreements, conditions of service, etc.).

Every time I needed both presales and support, I was always able to count on specialized teams. The longest I had to wait for a problem to be resolved was 48 hours (and the problem was not trivial as it involved IT).

Positive

Before this solution .NET scripts were used, however, the change was necessary to industrialize the activities.

Setup is easy if you're certified and IT savvy.

I personally install all of my clients' platforms.

The ROI we witnessed was very fast.

In the configuration phase, you need to have a certain degree of knowledge of Windows and Linux environments. That said, the wizards and manuals are of good quality. For the price, I would say that they are very competitive, and there is also the advantage of being able to purchase perpetual licenses - i.e., that you don't necessarily have to pay for the renewal every year. You only pay only when you want to update the version. If your application does not change, it is not necessary to update.

When I chose NICE, there really weren't any alternatives of equal quality.

We use this solution for our customer representatives and also for robotic automation. We primarily use this NICE product for making automation processes. I'm the Chief Information Officer and we are customers of NICE. 

Robotic Automation has saved us time and money by moving our processes away from manual work. 

I like the automation features that the product offers. 

The solution is not as intuitive as it could be and the integration took a lot of time. I still need an integrator to help develop the processes rather than doing it myself. 

I've been using this solution for a few months. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We communicate with the integrator when we need support and the integrator talks to NICE. We've had a good response to all the tickets we've opened. 

We used an integrator for the initial setup and implementation took nearly two months. All NICE products are a little complex to implement. We have around 30 users and plan to increase usage. We already have two more processes in development now. The solution is running all the time. 

I don't remember the figures but I know the licensing costs are similar to other solutions on the market. 

The RPA product has two aspects. It has the attended RPA that our customer representatives use and it has the unattended. When it comes to the attended processes, NICE provides a better product than other solutions.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We use unattended automation for the bulk of our contact center processes and our financial shared-service center. We don't have attended robots, although they're on our roadmap for the next three months.

We use it on-premise, currently, but we are moving, over the next two or three months, to Amazon AWS.

A good example of an unattended bot is for what we call the "three two two two error," It has saved us £450,000 almost overnight. We allow customers to book seats on our flights so that a family of four can all sit together. We charge our customers for that privilege and it should work fine. However, if the original aircraft assigned to that flight is replaced, as far as the customer's concerned the plane is there and everything seems fine, until they get on board. They find that their seat booking hasn't transferred across to the new aircraft. They end up sitting in various parts of the plane, which causes complaints. We end up issuing refunds and compensation to customers. By having an unattended robot move the seat booking from one flight to another, we saved, overnight, £450,000. It's a great story to be able to tell.

Another process we've automated in the contact center is called our "Disney Calendar." Disney manages all of its hotel rooms on a big spreadsheet, effectively. They send that out to every tour operator which then manually updates its systems to show which rooms are available and which ones are booked. We previously outsourced that to a company called WNS, where they had a team of 18 people processing the spreadsheet. They came in three times a week. But because of the volume of rooms and the amount of manual work, we were constantly behind. From our customers' perspective, we were selling them rooms for the holiday of a lifetime — so it's a big, expensive thing — that had already been booked elsewhere. Then we were having to manually call them back up and tell them that the room had been double-booked and that we could put them in this hotel or that room. We were starting off on the wrong foot and providing an awful customer experience. We automated that process.

Now, we have saved the cost of those 18 people that we were dependent on from an outsourcing partner. And processing the calendar, instead of taking three or four days to do one iteration of it, takes three hours and runs overnight. The customer experience is fantastic because everything is quick to market. Everything is absolutely correct because the robot is 100 percent accurate every time. We've seen an increase in our sales to Disney and a drop in complaints about Disney holidays, as a result of the automation going in.

The solution has improved employee productivity, but not directly. We've taken a process that a contact center agent, or somebody in the financial shared center, was doing, which was taking some 50 percent of their time. We've now freed them up to do other more interesting work, to be more productive and more innovative. We don't have any metrics that we can share to show what they've done with that time yet. We're not quite that mature yet. But if I were to approximate the increase in productivity in the contact center, I would say it's about 30 percent.

In terms of the solution improving customer experience by helping employees stay focused on the customer rather than on desktop complexities, that's not happening at the moment. We don't have attended automation. But by removing things like the Disney Calendar issue, where our contact center agents would be dealing with complaints, and the finance guys would be processing refunds and compensation, the impact of that automation has meant that those calls aren't coming in, so our agents are able to focus better on the customer experience than they would have previously been able to do.

NICE is one of the only vendors that does attended and unattended out-of-the-box. Using the unattended processes we've been able to build a "feature library." We break each process down into workable chunks that we can save into a big library. The next time we come to automate a task, we already have chunks of that automation built.

For example, logging into an application is what we call a feature. We build it and we put it into the library. The next time somebody comes along to automate a process that uses that application, the login feature is already there. That's one piece of work that they don't have to do. That feature-based build is something that's unique to NICE and we find it most valuable.

The API connectivity is strong, although we don't use it a lot. We tend to go with the screen connectivity. However, we use APIs to connect into SharePoint, and they work seamlessly.

The one thing I'd like to see, and NICE is already heavily investing in it, is improvement in the user interface itself. They call it the Designer and it's what the developers use. It is a bit clunky; that is the polite way to put it. I'd like to see it be a bit more user-friendly, a bit more intuitive, and to move to something a bit more web-based, so they could develop though the browser for Excel. I believe NICE is already heavily investing in that, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on that to have a quick play.

It's robust. I couldn't fault it.

The scalability is also very good, very robust. We, with our on-premise solution, are constrained by the size of our servers, which is why we're moving to Amazon WorkSpaces. That way we can scale as quickly as we possibly can, using the AWS toolset and NICE together.

With hindsight, if we were to go back two years, I would have built it in Amazon to start with. But we needed to get a proof of concept over the line and keep costs down. We learned through our mistakes over the past couple of years that we have reached a point where we have outgrown the infrastructure we're on. Because NICE is so scalable, we need to get onto infrastructure to support that capability.

NICE technical support is fantastic. They're very responsive. They're very quick. They're really keen to learn if there's a problem that we've identified in the tool itself. They then put their research and development department on it to work with us, almost instantly, to address the problem so they can fix it. They're brilliant. I can't fault them.

This is our first dabble into automation.

The technical setup of the solution was actually really straightforward. The part that's more complex, is the way that we at Thomas Cook set up our projects around it. We have multiple competing projects all wanting to use a shared infrastructure in slightly different ways. So the NICE tool setup was probably the easiest part. It's more our management and governance at the start, where we were quite immature and didn't have much experience for automation and that's how the CoE was born in Thomas Cook, to overcome those hurdles and provide a better service.

There was a learning curve about how to manage business automation. Take IT, for example. The change management processes, which we have in place to protect the business from itself, don't fit with automation that can be turned around in a couple of weeks. Traditionally the processes have been more archaic. A change request form would be submitted and then, three weeks later, you'd sit and present it to the board, and then your change would be approved or disapproved. If it was approved, you would go ahead the following week. So that timeline for implementation, traditionally, was four or five weeks. It would take less than that to build an automation and make it live. We had challenges around those ingrained processes from day one. So the CoE was brought in to make sure that the people within IT, and out in the business, who were not confident or were worried that we'd be impacting business applications or processes adversely, were brought along on that journey and that helped them overcome those issues quite well.

Those challenges are still there. There are still a few. It's more a case of reassurance. We've hit our target and it's starting to prove to the business that automation it works, that it does what it says on the tin. It makes everyone's life easier. We're just creating automations that replicate what a human is doing rather than building something new.

For example, and here I come back to change management, they were really worried that if we put a robot onto an application that the application would suffer because the robot was going too fast. Bringing them on that journey and showing them that we can actually speed the robot up or slow it down, that we can put more robots on or fewer, and that helps to make sure that we're not breaking anything. It wasn't a way of working that they'd previously seen or agreed to. But by showing them it is that easy, that we could just turn the thing off if we started to see something break or started to feel there's a problem. By showing them and bringing them along with us, we managed to turn it. They have all bought into what we're doing.

To get the first robot live took a lot longer than it should have. Again, not because of the NICE toolset, but because of the way we structured our projects. It took us the best part of six months to get the first robot live.

At the moment, we have a pipeline of work that's coming in from all over the group, around the world. That includes a contact center, a finance shared service center, human resources, IT, e-commerce, and our yield department. Pretty much everyone's seen the success that we have delivered over the past year and are keen to come on board. They have each assigned someone to be a project manager for automation and to manage their own pipeline of work within their own transformation programs. Each of the automation managers send through their roadmap to me. We then assign a business analyst to work with them to track some metrics, to find out what the benefits will be from automating.

Once we've got all that information together, the business analyst goes through in fine detail to understand what that process actually is. The process is then translated it into a technical document that we hand over to our developers who then build the solution within the NICE toolset. We go through a very small change management process within the center of excellence to make sure the documentation is up to date, that it can be supported, and to make sure there's capacity available on the servers. Then we put the automation live and monitor it for two or three weeks, depending on what the business wants. Once they've signed off on it — after two or three weeks of it being successful — it moves into our run team which then looks after the automation and any ongoing improvements going forward.

It took us a while to get there, but it's quite robust and we've got a lot of checkpoints in there to make sure that all our stakeholders are fully up to date and that it's all signed off and everyone has approved and is happy.

We used a company called PAteam. I think they are ex-NICE employees and they essentially showed us how to build automations. I have a team, internally now, of developers and BAs that the PAteam, and NICE, trained to show them how to do this stuff. They helped us turn it into factory so that we can repeat it. I thoroughly recommend PAteam to anybody. We wouldn't be where we are without them.

In terms of scaling and increasing the impact of automation, our center of excellence has been around for 11 months now. Our target for the year was a saving of £2 million and we've just hit £2.4 million. That's given us just over a two-to-one return on investment. By using that feature-based build that I mentioned earlier, where we take those component parts for login and logout, or copy and paste from this spreadsheet to that one, we are forecasting a five-to-one return on investment within the next 24 months.

We use a range of metrics for ROI. The team is a fixed cost, the centers of excellence are fixed costs. But we claim benefits in a variety of ways, such as the more traditional things like FTE savings, margin increases, cost avoidance, avoidance of brand damage, and risk-avoidance. Those are among the metrics that we use to build up that entire ROI. We see ROI on all those metrics.

We just moved to an enterprise license agreement. It's an all-you-can-eat license, so we don't have to count the licenses anymore. We have perpetual licenses with NICE and we pay an annual maintenance fee on them.

We've made a significant financial commitment to NICE. It shows that we are fully committed to NICE and to continuing the growth of automation within the group.

We looked at some of the other vendors, including UiPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. There were a few reasons that we took on the NICE product.

First, they're the only vendor that supplies attended and unattended automation out-of-the-box, which was a big tick in the box for us. Their levels of support were fantastic, and the level of training that they provided was what we needed. They were aware that we were completely new to this two years ago and they really heavily invested in us, providing onsite training, remote courses, and remote support for the developers. They couldn't have been better as far as the support package goes. Those were the key reasons we chose them.

Listen to people who have the experience, guys that have gone through it; guys like us at Thomas Cook who didn't know on day one how to do this, at all. Also, do research online, read all the horror stories of things that have gone wrong and believe them. Take your time at the beginning and make sure you do a proof of concept on something small or a series of small initiatives, rather than going in for the big fish on day one. Find your footings, get the foundations there, and then build on that. Think big but start small and scale fast.

In terms of lessons learned, it's been such a big journey, at such a fast pace of learning, that almost everything is a big lesson. The biggest thing we've learned from the mistakes we made back on day one was that we picked the wrong processes. If I were to go back and speak to myself in 2017, when this all started in Thomas Cook, I wouldn't go for the biggest, most complex process. I would take smaller, more intricate ones as a proof of concept to show that it works, and then scale up quickly. We did the reverse. We went for the benefits of automating huge processes and then went straight into trying to tackle them. That's why it took six months to get the first one over the line.

We haven't used the NICE Employee Virtual Assistant to help our employees with onscreen guidance or in-context recommendations. It's on our roadmap for the first quarter of the next financial year. Similarly, regarding automating employees' routine processes, it is on the roadmap for the first quarter as we move into attended solutions. It will include things like password resets and the like. We're using the Automation Finder to identify processes best suited for automation, but only as a proof of concept. It will be running for the next couple of weeks. We haven't had the results yet, but we're excited find out what we don't know.

Since we don't have any attended users, there's nobody within the business itself using the toolset. But we have a team of 11 that includes me. I have a gentleman called Jit Patel who heads up our RPA development group, and Kay Ellis who looks after a team of business analysts. Beneath them, we have four developers reporting directly to Jit, and four BAs reporting directly to Kay. I manage the center of excellence.

Deployment requires a BA and a developer working with the business unit itself. But as far as the NICE toolset and the automation side of things go, it's actually very quick for the business analyst. That person makes sure we've got the process nailed down and then translated into a technical document so that a process of, say, 50 business steps is actually 12 features. They work on building those features in the document that the developer then brings to life.

As for increased usage of NICE, we started off with just two business areas in mind, the UK contact center and our financial shared service center which is in Palma, Mallorca. At the point that we got the first two robots live, we realized that we needed to build an internal function to manage these things. That's when the center of excellence was formed, and that's allowed us to then move out to lots of other areas. We have automations live for human resources, IT, costing and yield areas, finance contact center, and we have plans over the next six months to move across into our other source markets. That includes Germany, the Nordics, and everywhere else that we essentially have a Thomas Cook footprint. We're starting to expand out into a group for attended solutions. When we move to the Amazon infrastructure in AWS, we'll look to deploy attended automation from that central infrastructure as well. We have big plans to expand.

Overall, I would give NICE a solid ten out of ten. I can't fault them. It has been fantastic.

We use it for agent guidance. This is a system that pops up throughout the call and helps them guide the conversation with the customer and makes sure they say what they need to say, in terms of regulatory stuff. That's especially true when they're selling product. It is used all the time by all the agents who are on the phone.

We use the RTI software for other parts of the business as well. That's in development at the moment. We're working on the functionality to do things like auto notes or to mute the call when they're taking card details.

In terms of results, we tracked it when we first launched it. We had a pilot team using it and we tracked customer satisfaction through NPS. There was an increase in customer satisfaction. We increased our NPS overall by four percent within the first four weeks, and it's been going up.

And we did tracking around employee engagement, in terms of their sense of how they felt they were being supported by the system, and they felt better. It did have a positive impact.

Overall, with the RTI client, it improved our average call-handling time on every type of call that came through. With the new agent-guidance running, over the course of four weeks, we dropped it by 60 seconds overall. That was massive. It resulted in over £1,000,000 in savings within that first month. And we're doing more little things to tweak the journeys, making it slicker, giving them more abilities and building in other journeys to help them. It has increased employee productivity massively.

In terms of employee accuracy, we have a complaint-monitoring team that quality-marks random calls. They look at compliance quality as well as whether it was a good outcome for the customer. Was it a good conversation? They give the call a score and that is one of the agents' metrics. The quality has gotten better. Employees aren't getting mixed up on what they have to say. As a company, in the contact center, we've gone from a 49 percent "good" rate to 59 percent.

The standout feature is that we've been able to change it completely, visually. It has got icons, you can go into links, it's very colorful. We changed the whole look and feel of it in January. We developed all that last year with the developer.

Guidance at other places can be a script, a Word document, or some sort of application which is there for the agent to go through while doing sales. What we've done with the RTI client is that we've brought it into a bit more of a 21st-century feel. Our agents have the ability to move around when they want, click into stuff. They use it according to how their conversations go with the customer. 

There are extra features we built into it. For example, at one stage, they can click a button and it checks another system for another product that we sell, a monthly product, because we don't want to sell that at the same time giving the client duplicate coverage. 

We have no issues really that I'm aware of, from the front-line. Since we went onto this new system, it doesn't crash or anything like that. It's because we coupled it up with other systems. In terms of stability, it's really good.

We have no issues with the call-monitoring system either. When the system records our calls, we have no problems with that either.

We're looking at scaling now because a lot of the rest of the business is really keen to look at what we've done with agent guidance and how they can incorporate NICE in other parts of the business. 

We started off small, where we had 250 to 300 people using it. But now they want me to look at whether we give it to another area of the business. So we are looking to scale it up across other areas that might use different systems.

It all depends on priorities for my boss' boss. At the moment we're looking at the commercial aspect of our business. They sell different products compared to our contact center. We've got a specialist unit that does caravans and motor homes. They're the two areas that are going to be next: our business teams and then our motor-home team.

Tech support is very good. They've been really supportive, very helpful. Whenever I had a problem, when I was looking at the design of the new system, I could ring up a couple of them and they'd have their people regularly come to see me. I needed to understand what was happening with the system, but not the technical side.

We did not have agent-guiding RPA before NICE.

Before the RPA client, our system was functional. However, it had a tendency to be slow or caught up. It could jump about a bit, so it wasn't as reliable. And the way we had designed the old system, the information, text, and words which we put in it, they were written in first-person, as if being spoken by a front-line agent, but the agents, at times, didn't relay the information very well to customers. It wasn't customer-focused.

With RPA, we designed the system but also modified the content. We changed the wording around to be more customer-focused. We worked with the front-line agents to better understand what they wanted to see, how they would say it naturally, so that the information would be better understood across the board.

The initial setup took place before I started with this company. I have been involved in upgrading and that did not take very long. It was more a case of our internal mechanisms, getting ourselves organized and ready for the upgrade.

Our implementation strategy for the upgrade, first of all, meant we had to upgrade in 200 to 300 PCs on our floor plan. We connected to all the PCs and we did half of them over a couple of days. Any issues, where it couldn't remotely connect to upgrade, I needed the floor plan so I could go to that PC and have a look at it. Often it was either that the PC was switched off or had a bug or some other application needed to be reset.

Once we got it organized it was very quick. What took time were our internal processes to organize resources with our IT department and then to do it first thing in the morning, before the first shift would start. The upgrade process was done by three people. 

The solution is maintained by our IT service desk. If anyone has a problem with any system issue, they call them. The IT service desk looks into it. It could be that they just need to have it reinstalled, or that there's a problem with another part of the system. It's maintained constantly through our standard process.

In terms of return on investment for us, there has been a massive amount within our quality measurements: the quality of our customer's experience, that handling time. We're able to answer more calls, so more of our customers are getting through to us. That is a return on investment.

For me, personally, the biggest lesson I've learned from using NICE is about how having certain IT software can really enhance performance, and I had never really thought of it that way. We can use the system to get through to making a sale, but I never really thought that it could actually enhance the agents' thought process, their journey, and how they speak to customers. That's been a big lesson for me.

In terms of advice, be open-minded. We just told them what we would like it to do, and went out there with a bit of a blue-sky thought process: If we could have anything, what would it do? And it turned out that it could do that, and we were quite amazed. I would tell people to think outside the box, think of something else that you would want it to be like in a few years' time and you may actually get close to that, or even achieve it, without realizing, at first, that you could. Sometimes we're so constrained by what we're used to doing, by doing things a certain way, using the same systems, we don't realize that a system has more capabilities than we realized.

The employees have loved it. We haven't gotten the statistics on employee satisfaction yet, they're due soon. But we've received a lot of feedback and we engaged them very early on. We held a naming competition for the guidance system. They all put in suggestions. The top-five were picked and then they voted on them. They chose the name. And every time we did a journey, we had agents from the floor in a room and they went through the journey and looked at. They built it with me in that sense. They were all engaged at the time. And we have a pilot team on the floor using it. When we went live and launched across the business, they were all involved in floor-walking, helping other agents with the system. There has been a lot of involvement of the front line, which helps employee engagement because they feel part of it. It's their system that way.

They named their guidance "Winston." No other companies use it the way we've used it, as far as I'm aware; I was looking at other companies which use NICE.

I'm more an end-user. I've worked with the development guys to make it user-friendly, for the people in our company who are on the phones.

I'd like to know the common places that the agents are going within the system. I'd like to see if they are spending a lot of time in a certain section because we could then look at whether that section is clear. What is it from that section that they need more support in? That's what we're doing now in the second half of the year: What they use it for. But the automation stuff in the background is also a big, key thing that is being done.

We have attended and unattended bots. We have quite a lot of on unattended robots. We've got a lot of processes where a transaction is done and it will send off the results. That is automatically done in another system. We send customers a yearly invite and that is done by unattended. That goes off and does everything in the background and produces it on the system.

We are looking at things within our other departments at the moment, where they're doing a lot of manual processes. We're working with NICE at the moment, their Automation Finder, which looks at what our people actually do, all these manual processes and the same things being tracked by them. We'll look at putting unattended robotics in the background so then they don't have to do those actions. If it's always the same action at the end of a certain task, we can get the system to do it instead, and free up our people. Obviously, we do have to do a full analysis afterward. From a human perspective, I will look into what they're doing. We're going to have a look at what the Automation Finder brings up and then look at it in context. We will look at it from both sides to make sure. There are times when there needs to be a bit of human interaction or a checkpoint and there are other times when that's not needed. It all depends on what it finds for us. We've not gotten the data back yet.

I would rate NICE at nine out of ten, from my experience. A ten would mean I am able to view what people do on the system as well, rather than just listen. I know NICE has the capabilities, it's just that we haven't purchased that. We are looking into it.

We used NICE for the back office. Our company has now integrated UiPath, and currently, we are using UiPath.

It is easy to deploy. To do the automation in NICE, you really need to use your programming expertise. There are no inbuilt features in it, and you have to create all the required features, which can be very interesting for a programmer.

Its connectivity with other applications should be improved. In the version that I was using, it would just stop interacting with the other application.

Its graphical interface should also be improved. It should have a user-friendly interface. Sometimes, people find it very difficult to understand.

One of the obstacles that I faced while programming was that if I needed any kind of help, there wasn't much content on the internet. It can be very difficult to find a solution for a particular issue. 

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

I am not sure about the latest version of NICE, but in the version that I was using, it would just stop interacting with the other application. I don't know what happened to the bot or NICE application, but all of a sudden, it would get disconnected from the other application. It was one of the main issues that we were facing.

I am not sure whether it is scalable or not. We had just ten people who were using NICE. My team is very small.

We contacted them only once or twice because we were very helpless and unable to solve the issue ourselves. They definitely helped us, but it is a complex task to raise a request and schedule a meeting with them. Sometimes, it is very difficult to contact them because of the timing issue.

We are no longer using NICE. We have moved to UiPath. You don't need programming skills to use UiPath, whereas to use NICE, you should definitely have a good knowledge of programming. 

There is not much information available on the internet about NICE, which makes it very difficult to use, whereas UiPath has a huge library. You can easily get help without contacting the vendor. 

The interface of UiPath is very easy to use, whereas NICE is very complex, and the automation is done in many parts.

It was easy to deploy because the installation packages are very simple. It doesn't require any maintenance.

We got help from the company. They helped us initially, and later on, we did it on our own.

As per my understanding, UiPath has a much lesser cost than NICE, but I am not sure.

I would recommend UiPath over NICE. I would rate NICE Robotic Automation a six out of ten.

It is a kind of desktop automation. It is for user-initiated and very specific automation, almost like macros. We have its latest version.

It is a kind of desktop automation. Its licensing model is a little bit different. It tends to be individual automation specific to a role. It excels at that.

We haven't found it to be as powerful as some of the other platforms. From a true RPA perspective, it is pretty far behind some of the other solutions. It has emerged as a more desktop automation kind of tool, but it lacks a lot of enterprise features.

It is not really a true RPA because of its licensing, which is kind of user-initiated. It would be nice it can be deployed at a more enterprise licensing model versus a user-based model.

It didn't have autonomous automation so far, and they have just released this feature. They have kind of hodgepodged a bunch of products together to get there, but it is not as seamless as other solutions.

I have been using this solution for just about a year. 

Its stability seems fine.

Because of its licensing model being at a per-user cost, it is more expensive to scale in a large enterprise. Its scalability is quite low as compared to an enterprise RPA license where you're paying for a bot that can work across hundreds and thousands of users. It gets expensive to scale it, and it is not as dynamic.

It is pretty straightforward. It is a basic solution.

I would not recommend this solution. I would advise others to look at a different solution. It is far behind other competitors in terms of a true RPA and lacks a lot of enterprise features. It does not have autonomous automation.

I would rate NICE Robotic Automation a five out of ten. It has a purpose, and it has a place. It is fine for what it does.